Richards steers clear of razor's edge to guide Wigan revival

Saturday 29 September 2007 18.52 EDT
First published on Saturday 29 September 2007 18.52 EDT

Pat Richards can measure the unbeaten run that has taken Wigan to within two wins of the Super League Grand Final by the length of his facial hair.

Richards agreed with five team-mates after a heavy defeat at Warrington on August 5 that they would grow moustaches until they were beaten again. Winning four of their next five matches and drawing the other earned the club a first play-off appearance for three years, and a daunting trip to Bradford for the hirsute half-dozen last Friday night.

They seemed certain to be saved any further facial embarrassment when the Bulls powered to a 30-6 lead early in the second half, only for Trent Barrett to lead an astonishing Wigan fightback which culminated in Richards kicking a late drop goal to snatch a 31-30 win.

That was the cue for plenty of gags about Wigan's close shave, and leaves Richards and his mates in danger of being mistaken for an Eagles tribute band in another sudden-death play-off match at Hull tonight.

The 25-year-old full-back blames his fellow Australian Bryan Fletcher, the veteran second-row who earned a stinging rebuke from his mother when pictures of the Bradford game reached her in Sydney earlier this week.

"Fletch said after the Warrington game that he wasn't going to shave his mo' until we lost again, and a few of the other boys were stupid enough to go along with him," Richards said. "I guess the only thing about looking like we do at the moment is that it shows that we haven't lost for a while." Wigan's late-season surge has brought back memories for Richards of his previous triumph in Australia's National Rugby League with Wests Tigers in 2005, when they won their last eight games of the regular season to finish fourth in the table, and then cruised through three rounds of the play-offs before beating the North Queensland Cowboys 30-16 to clinch their first title.

Richards was expected to miss that final after suffering ankle ligament damage when they beat a St George Illawarra team including Barrett to reach the finale. However, he recovered to score a spectacular try regarded as one of the best in Australian grand final history, taking an audacious reverse flick from the Tigers' young Kiwi half-back Benji Marshall and striding 50 metres to the line - beating two Cowboys defenders en route including Matt Sing, who now plays for Hull and will be in the opposition again today.

"I guess it was a bit similar with the Tigers to the situation we're in now," he added. "We got a bit of momentum up at the back end of the season and, like with Wigan this year, it meant we'd been playing finals footy well before the finals actually started. It would be great to get to another Grand Final with Wigan, but we can't start thinking about Old Trafford yet. We've got two more games to win before we get there starting with Hull, and it will be a tough enough task there."

Richards, whose parents emigrated to Sydney from Dublin just before he was born, must have spent much of 2006 regretting his move to Wigan, as he struggled to settle in a team who made a dreadful start to the season and found themselves in deep relegation danger until Ian Millward was sacked and Brian Noble was appointed to lead them out of trouble. As such a high-profile signing he received more criticism than most and his confidence was unmistakeably shredded. "A lot of people were saying things, and although I wasn't really paying attention, I suppose it was pretty tough," he reflects now.

"When I got to the club Pat was like a lot of the other people here, on the crest of a slump," Noble agreed. "He was playing at centre and had been exposed a bit, and he wasn't enjoying his football. But once he got back out to the wing his form was pretty good."

This season Richards has been thrust into the roles of first-choice goalkicker, and then full-back following the loss of Michael Withers with injury and Chris Ashton to rugby union, and he has respo nded to the challenge with 14 tries and 125 goals at an impressive 82.78% success rate - plus that crucial drop goal at Bradford, the first of his career. "He's got on with the job manfully," Noble said.

His plans for tomorrow morning will revolve around Setanta's live coverage of the 2007 Australian Grand Final, between Melbourne Storm and Manly Sea Eagles. All of Wigan hopes that he will be watching unshaven.